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Siege of Angers (1560)
The Siege of Angers occurred in the winter of 1560 when Huguenot Protestant rebels seized a Benedictine monastery outside of Angers, holding several choir boys hostage. Queen Mother Catherine de Medici blamed the hostage crisis on the Protestant nobleman Louis I of Bourbon, Prince de Conde (placing the bodies of his soldiers at the scene), forcing Conde to flee the French court and side with England and the Huguenot rebels against France. The siege was one of the events which precipitated the start of the French Wars of Religion in 1562. Background In 1560, as the Catholic regent of Scotland Mary of Guise neared her last days, she called on her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots to return from Paris and assume control of her kingdom. At the time of Mary of Guise's passing, Scotland was divided between the loyal Catholic elite and the rebellious Protestant "Lords of the Congregation", who opposed Mary of Guise's hardline Catholicism and her appointing of several French nobles to high positions instead of promoting Scots. Queen Mary soon received news from Admiral Sinet that the Scottish Protestants had openly declared war against the crown and that their 1,000-strong army had already beheaded lords and ladies and left their bodies behind as warnings. In response, Mary and her lover Louis I of Bourbon, Prince de Conde planned to set out for Scotland, but doing so meant that Mary would have to abandon her sickly estranged husband King Francis II of France. When her plan to hire Vincent Renaud's private army was thwarted through the efforts of Queen Mother Catherine de Medici and the powerful nobleman Stephane Narcisse, Mary convinced her husband to dispatch 2,000 French troops to Scotland to help the Catholic nobility restore order, although Mary cancelled her own plans to travel to Scotland herself. Siege In response to the dispatching of 2,000 French soldiers under General Savoy to Scotland to crush the Protestant uprising, over a dozen French Huguenot rebels assailed the Benedictine monastery near Angers, killing over forty French guards and monks and taking the children there (including many noble children) hostage. Two of the choir boys escaped to tell King Francis about their predicament. Francis was unable to recall Savoy's army, as he was doing another offensive sweep in the Scottish Borderlands, so Mary and Francis assembled the castle guards and prepared to launch a rescue mission. The radicals scattered the boys throughout the monastery to prevent a single rescue effort, and they also stored 30 barrels of gunpowder in the monastery in order to blow themselves up with the boys; they waited until the terror to take hold before destroying the monastery. The King's deputy Sebastian de Poitiers led a unit of castle guards to the monastery, where they were ambushed by arrow fire in the courtyard, suffering heavy losses. Sebastian then returned to court and informed Francis that the reports about two guards being placed on the eastern grounds were false, and that three French soldiers were dead because of it. Sebastian reminded Francis that the soldiers used were the wrong kind, and Mary expressed her concern that the rebels would blow themselves up even sooner. Queen Catherine then suggested that King Francis employ Stephane Narcisse's mercenary general Vincent Renaude and his army to storm the monastery, reluctantly doing so. Sebastian then reported that some of the dead guards at the monastery wore Conde's coat of arms, and that his spies had reported that Conde had met with Protestant leaders during his absence from court; these bodies were placed at the scene by Narcisse with the goal of framing Conde and engineering his downfall. Renaude and his forces then surrounded the monastery, and his lieutenant Joubert shut down the monastery's water pumps to force the defenders to draw water from the stream instead. Two Huguenot rebels were captured, and they confirmed that there were 24 armed men in the monastery and that most of the hostages were being held in the chapel. Renaude and Sebastian decided to head to the chapel as Joubert continued on to the dormitories, launching a two-pronged assault. They succeeded in rescuing the children and preventing the Huguenots from throwing torches at the gunpowder, ending the crisis. Aftermath The Prince de Conde, who was now hated by the French court after being wrongfully accused of culpability, decided to flee the French court, while Mary refused to join him. Conde then met with the English diplomat Lord Akers and agreed to marry Queen Elizabeth I of England, taking part in a secret proxy wedding in order to make him King consort of England. Unaware of Conde's secret marriage, Mary sent Conde a written guarantee of safe passage so that he could escpae. Valois French spies set fire to the house where Elizabeth's proxy Annabelle Breton and the other witnesses to the marriage were sleeping, killing all of them and destroying all documentation of the marriage, undoing it. Conde was later captured, but he escaped from French captivity with Akers' help and was ordered to rally the French Protestants into an army and rebel against France with English aid. Category:French Wars of Religion Category:Sieges